The present invention relates generally to the field of managing procurement. More particularly, the present invention relates to a system and method for managing a purchasing process.
Providers of retail sales articles and services must seek to provide the right product, at the right place, at the right time. Particularly, with regard to sales of retail fashion articles, these articles often have a short life cycle, and new articles have to be presented quite frequently. At the same time, the consumers demand a wide assortment variety. Accordingly, large numbers of different fashion articles often have to be processed and procured within extremely short time frames. Alternatively, the procurement process may involve extended ordering times, wherein an order must be placed 6 months in advance.
Further, tracking inventory and budgets for seasonal items can be important to the profitability of a business. For example, identifying a particularly well selling items and ordering additional quantities to arrive on time and within a prescribed budget may increase the profitability of a retail location. Accordingly, it is important for a business to carefully plan and schedule purchasing orders for retail sales articles and services to ensure on-time procurement or scheduling within budget constraints.
The amount of information and the number of operations that are made available to a manger of multiple workbenches that is responsible for a large number of purchase orders can grow to be prohibitive. For example, a manager may be required to coordinate a large number of purchase orders, performing operations such as budget approval, coordinating delivery, managing missed delivery, updating orders based on current volumes, etc. Further, the manager may be responsible for a large number of purchase orders and need a system and method for grouping and coordinating the large volume, but also may need a system and method that allows drilling down through the data to access any particular purchase order to see status, make changes, etc.
In view of the foregoing, it would be beneficial to provide a system and method for managing purchase orders for sales articles and services to be purchased. It would further be beneficial to provide a purchase order manager configured to provide a single interface allowing access to underlying functionality allowing the user to manage the purchase orders. It would be further beneficial to provide a purchase order manager which may be configured to allow grouping of purchase orders to facilitate management of the underlying purchase orders.